Disney, YouTube Cut Ties With PewDiePie, Top YouTube Submitter, Over Anti-Semitic Videos (techcrunch.com)

jo7hs2 writes: Disney's Maker Studios has cut ties PewDiePie, the YouTube submitter with 53 million subscribers, over anti-Semitic clips the submitter released earlier in the year. The clips, three videos published in January, have since been removed from the channel. According to TechCrunch, "They included one skit in which [Felix Kjellberg, PewDiePie's real name] paid a Sri Lanka-based group of men to hold up a sign that read 'Death to All Jews,' while another featured a clip of a man dressed as Jesus saying that 'Hitler did absolutely nothing wrong.' Kjellberg used freelance job finding site Fiverr for both clips. He argued that he wasn't serious with either and instead wanted to show the things people will do for money." A spokesperson for Maker Studios, which was acquired by Disney in 2014, told the Wall Street Journal, "Although Felix has created a following by being provocative and irreverent, he clearly went too far in this case and the resulting videos are inappropriate." Writing on his Tumblr blog, Kjellberg said the purpose of the examples was "to show how crazy the modern world is, specifically some of the services available online." He continued, "I picked something that seemed absurd to me -- That people on Fiverr would say anything for 5 dollars. I think it's important to say something and I want to make one thing clear: I am in no way supporting any kind of hateful attitudes."

UPDATE 2/14/17: YouTube has also cut ties with Kjellberg. A YouTube representative confirmed to Business Insider that the company has canceled its YouTube Red original show starring Kjellberg. Business Insider reports: "Kjellberg's show, 'Scare PewDiePie,' was a YouTube original accessible through the company's subscription service, YouTube Red. The show was about to premiere its second season. YouTube is also removing Kjellberg from Google's preferred advertising program, which helps the platform's most popular personalities attract bigger advertisers."

Comments

Who cares?

[sgage]

Who. Fucking. Cares? What is a PewDiePie? This is news?

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok grandpa.

Read it as "(Label) drops (Artist) after (Artist) does something distasteful." These kind of stories really are all the same and unless you care deeply about (Label) or (Artist) they don't matter.

disney are idiots

[mOzone]

pewdiepie shaved his ass and sent the hair off so someone could bake a cake ..and for valentine's day video had humping penis's for 5 mins ...100s of video along same lines ...and disney didn't care ....but the fiver video was the (((last straw))) ...lol hypocrites

Re:disney are idiots

[Khyber]

"There are no possible jokes that can be made about the Holocaust."

Please. Tragedy plus Time equals Comedy. Anyone can joke about anything. The real joke as of current, speaking of time, is your disingenuous nonsense.

"The fact that you do not understand why this is so shows that you are at risk of something like it happening in your lifetime."

You mean the several other genocides which have happened since WWII, most fucking recent one being the Srebrenica massacre? That you're so blind to think that not one other genocide has happened, let alone in their lifetime, is yet another comedic tragedy, and it's your ignorance that perpetuates and furthers the possibility of these genocides happening.

"How could it be that less than a year ago it would be unimaginable that you could end up dying in a chemical weapons attack in Iran?"

Bullshit, son. They've got ammonia and bleach and aluminum over there, in great fucking quantities. Chlorine gas is easily manufactured in the home, and is ALWAYS a persistent threat due to the ready availability of the three substances needed. Yet another comedic example of your tragic dysfunctional logic processes. Looks like you can only go one or two steps ahead - you'd be a poor chess player.

"How do you feel about going off to fight Iran?"

You know exactly jack about our military capability, eh? Roughly three days of US Air Superiority would guarantee that it wouldn't be much of a fucking fight, let me tell you. It would essentially be as simple as rolling in and dropping the conventional explosives equivalent of a few nukes. Reality, we could simply take the entirety of the Middle East within two weeks, spend about a year fighting a ground war wiping out every possible bit of opposition using our advanced satellite technology to track targets and scan for them, and then that area is simply ours.

Assuming one had a competent leader and plan for them to execute, anyways. Can't say that with our current chief-of-leaks.

"You have absolutely no idea how easy it is for society to turn on a pin and exterminate millions of people."

I'm pretty sure the entire world was watching our election and is just waiting for the second part to happen.

Works better than expected

[Anonymous Coward]

[He] wanted to show the things people will do for money.

It worked better than he expected. Much better.

He actually exposed the hypocrisy of the loony-left media-industrial propaganda complex and the things they will do for money.

The media-industrial complex has been accused to be ignorant as to why it lost belly-up in Nov 2016. The reality is that there is no such ignorance. Instead it chooses to be the bitch of the loony hyperliberal special interest which actively stifles anything not conforming to its slave ideology.

Re:Works better than expected

[Anonymous Coward]

Think most people missed what his 'message' was. You can hire people say whatever you want. It doesn't even cost much. Somehow people want to pretend it is not going on.

Yes what he did was racist. But he also has a bigger message that most people seem to want to ignore. You can *BUY* whatever narrative you want. That is not a good thing. Hell he bought it for 5 bucks a head.

Think some billionaire with a chip on his shoulder wouldn't do the exact same thing? If not why not?

I personally think exactly that has been going on for a long time. My wife decided to donate to one of these organizations once. Holy hell, did we get real spam mail for years. I am talking 10-15 per week. All of these 'grass roots' organizations are clearly thinly veiled money laundering schemes for rich people to push whatever narrative they want. The DNC itself in the past year has been caught on tape many times buying trouble. I have 0 doubt the RNC does the exact same thing.

Re:Works better than expected

[Oceanplexian]

Yes it is perfectly reasonable to make Holocaust jokes. It's another century, in case that isn't too obvious.

Are we going to outlaw jokes about the American Revolution? Jokes about the Ancient Egyptians? At what point are people not allowed to be offended by something that did not occur in your lifetime and is a part of the history books? This group above is not denying the Holocaust or Nazi-ism. It is a parody.

Re:Works better than expected

[Anonymous Coward]

Protip: The brown shirt fascists are the ones protesting against free speech, assaulting people, and lighting shit on fire while screaming obscenities at anyone who doesn't buy into their ideology 100%.

Re:Judging by his name

[MightyMartian]

Who said a Jew can't be anti-Semitic?

Re:Hypocrite much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting you should bring that up.

I'm curious. What do you think muslims were doing around the time of the Crusades?

Re:Who cares?

[Jack9]

Youtube's highest paid content creator (and conversely highest earning content creator for YouTube) was cut over pressure from a partner corporation (which in turn came from the ironic, , via a pessimistic (mis)interpretation of an entertainment video? It is geek news. The trolls implying that he might possibly be antisemitic are just perpetuating the status quo, in promoting that there are more than seven words you can't say.

Re:Lesson Learned... The Jews Control Everything

[Nocturrne]

The jewish mafia controlling the entertainment business blacklists anyone who even uses the words "jew" or "nazi.' His entertainment related career is over...

Re:Who cares?

[gravewax]

he is still right, Who the fuck cares, this is not supposed to be a pseudo celebrity gossip rag. We have enough shit that is border line whether it belongs here, this is so far into fucking no mans land you can't even see the border.

Re:Who cares?

[AmiMoJo]

You can't serious spin this as some kind of politically correct overreaction or trolling. Disney is extremely conservative, everyone knows this, PewDiePie knew it when he partnered with them. So expecting a video with guys holding "death to Jews" signs up to be okay with them was dumb at best.

Once again, it must be pointed out that Youtube does host a huge amount of far right neo-Nazi Jew hating material. That doesn't give anyone the right to be paid to produce it.

Re:Video here

[CustomSolvers2]

Without knowing anything about this guy (other than the South Park reference mentioned above), I know already a lot about his personality just by watching this video excerpt, his intention, his apparent motivation, his reactions, etc.: the kind of rich (or problem-free or egoist) asshole with a distorted perception of the world, overwhelmed by the tremendous amount of information and all what is associated with internet, responsible for a new wave of extremely-ignorant-and-completely-unaware fanaticism. I don't mean just the usual peculiarities associated with the behaviour of these youtubers, but the whole internet-based group-thinking movement: SJWs (bear in mind that I am an over-understanding leftist), Twitter or Facebook or whatever lynch squads and even programming-related fanatic and ignorant group-thinking (I know something about this too).

Just in case my position is not clear, here comes a summary of what I see in this video:

1. The guy firstly complains about the people to whom he has paid $5 (!!!) not doing what he wants. My impression is that these people were trying to give more for the paid price, kind of highlighting that all was a joke. If I was in his shoes, just watching these guys doing these stupid things for me because I paid them $5 would have made me feel horrible.

2. The expected result is delivered exactly as instructed; and this guy behaves firstly as if it was incredible (?! Weren't you complaining 5 seconds before because they didn't do it?!) and then shameful?! They are just words, exactly your words?! Don't you feel ashamed about writing such a sentence and hire some people to show it in a video, but you do feel ashamed of watching it in that video?! Why? Out-of-context words have no meaning, and much less the exact format in which these words are expressed; all what matters is intention. If you have ever had that thought, it would be equally bad than writing it or showing it in a video. There is no difference. There is hypocrisy, ignorance, self-esteem issues and being overhelmed by what you cannot even understand. Only a hypocrite can see any difference between actually doing/thinking/saying something wrong in one format or a different one.

3. The most incredible part and what perfectly describes the aforementioned new wave of half-persons with lots of power (or, at least, a very large audience): he dares to blame the two guys he hired for $5 (!!) for doing what he asked them to do!!! Even though he was complaining when they delayed that output for some seconds!! Complains about the world being wrong because some people have to work for an asshole for 5 miserable dollars! But he doesn't realise that he is the asshole!! He is the person who has provoked such an output! He had the intention (= all what matters)!

This guy thinks that paying $5 to people needing that money to do something pathetic makes sense. He thinks that being angry with these people in case of not doing exactly what he wants makes sense. He thinks that blaming these people for doing exactly what he instructed them to do makes sense. He thinks that feeling bad (better: showing that he feels bad) about a specific format (actually showing certain words in a video), but not caring about other (thinking about/writing these exact words somewhere else or hiring someone to write them) makes also sense. If he read the current post (or other descriptive-enough text), he would likely understand what he did wrong, even feel bad about his behaviour and never repeat it again. He would learn (basics about being a person) because he doesn't know it, but he is surprisingly unaware about this fact. He most likely thinks that his understanding capabilities are better than the average ones, thanks to his blind-supporters bubble. Other very curious issue of this kind of people is that they seem to think that what they deliver ($5 or his ideas in the video or anything else) is really valuable! No idea what others think, but the only feeling which they can provoke in me is pity. Is he a bad guy? He will